Midnight's Children (9 page)

Absence of Nadir in his underworld! Warned by Aziz's first roar, overcome by the embarrassment which flooded over him more easily than monsoon rain, he vanished. A trap-door flung open in one of the toilets-yes, the very one, why not, in which he had spoken to Doctor Aziz from the sanctuary of a washing-chest. A wooden 'thunderbox'-a 'throne'-lay on one side, empty enamel pot rolling on coir matting. The toilet had an outside door giving out on to the gully by the cornfield; the door was open. It had been locked from the outside, but only with an Indian-made lock, so it had been easy to force… and in the soft lamplit seclusion of the Taj Mahal, a shining spittoon, and a note, addressed to Mumtaz, signed by her husband, three words long, six syllables, three exclamation marks: Talaaq! Talaaq! Talaaq!

The English lacks the thunderclap sound of the Urdu, and anyway you know what it means. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. I divorce thee. Nadir Khan had done the decent thing.

О awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found the bird had flown! This was the colour he saw: red. О anger fully comparable to my grandfather's fury, though expressed in petty gestures! Major Zulfy, at first, hopped up and down in helpless fits of temper; controlled himself at last; and-rushed out through bathroom, past throne, alongside cornfield, through perimeter gate. No sign of a running, plump, longhair, rhymeless poet. Looking left: nothing. And right: zero. Enraged Zulfy made his choice, pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street. Urchins, dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon. Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins' skill. What an unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch. A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his progress. Major Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. О even more unfortunate; because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running' had unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major Zulfy's day… slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it over, into the dust. He jumped on it-once! twice! again!-flattening it, and refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. Then, with some dignity, he limped away, back to the car parked outside my grandfather's house. The old ones retrieved their brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape.

'Now that I'm getting married,' Emerald told Mumtaz, 'it'll be very rude of you if you don't even try to have a good time. And you should be giving me advice and everything.' At the time, although Mumtaz smiled at her younger sister, she had thought it a great cheek on Emerald's part to say this; and, unintentionally perhaps, had increased the pressure of the pencil with which she was applying henna tracery to the soles of her sister's feet. 'Hey!' Emerald squealed, 'No need to get mad! I just thought we should try to be friends.'

Relations between the sisters had been somewhat strained since Nadir Khan's disappearance; and Mumtaz hadn't liked it when Major Zulfikar (who had chosen not to charge my grandfather with harbouring a wanted man, and squared it with Brigadier Dodson) asked for, and received, permission to marry Emerald. 'It's like blackmail,' she thought. 'And anyway, what about Alia? The eldest shouldn't be married last, and look how patient she's been with her merchant fellow.' But she said nothing, and smiled her forebearing smile, and devoted her gift of assiduity to the wedding preparations, and agreed to try and have a good time; while Alia went on waiting for Ahmed Sinai. ('She'll wait forever,' Padma guesses: correctly.)

January 1946. Marquees, sweetmeats, guests, songs, fainting bride, stiff-at-attention groom: a beautiful wedding… at which the leather-cloth merchant, Ahmed Sinai, found himself deep in conversation with the newly-divorced Mumtaz. 'You love-children?-what a coincidence, so do I…' 'And you didn't have any, poor girl? Well, matter of fact, my wife couldn't…' 'Oh, no; how sad for you; and she must have been bad-tempered like anything!''… Oh, like hell… excuse me. Strength of emotions carried me away.''-Quite all right; don't think about it. Did she throw dishes and all?' 'Did she throw? In one month we had to eat out of newspaper!' 'No, my goodness, what whoppers you tell!' 'Oh, it's no good, you're too clever for me. But she did throw dishes all the same.' 'You poor, poor man.' 'No-you. Poor, poor you.' And thinking: 'Such a charming chap, with Alia he always looked so bored…' And,'… This girl, I never looked at her, but my goodness me…' And,'… You can tell he loves children; and for that I could…' And,'… Well, never mind about the skin…' It was noticeable that, when it was time to sing, Mumtaz found the spirit to join in all the songs; but Alia remained silent. She had been bruised even more badly than her father in Jallianwala Bagh; and you couldn't see a mark on her.

'So, gloomy sis, you managed to enjoy yourself after all.'

In June that year, Mumtaz re-married. Her sister-taking her cue from their mother-would not speak to her until, just before they both died, she saw her chance of revenge. Aadam Aziz and Reverend Mother tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Alia that these things happen, it was better to find out now than later, and Mumtaz had been badly hurt and needed a man to help her recover… besides, Alia had brains, she would be all right. 'But, but,' Alia said, 'nobody ever married a book.' 'Change your name,' Ahmed Sinai said. 'Time for a fresh start. Throw Mumtaz and her Nadir Khan out of the window, I'll choose you a new name. Amina. Amina Sinai: you'd like that?' 'Whatever you say, husband,' my mother said. 'Anyway,' Alia, the wise child, wrote in her diary, 'who wants to get landed with this marrying business? Not me; never; no.'

Mian Abdullah was a false start for a lot of optimistic people; his assistant (whose name could not be spoken in my father's house) was my mother's wrong turning. But those were the years of the drought; many crops planted at that time ended up by coming to nothing.

'What happened to the plumpie?' Padma asks, crossly, 'You don't mean you aren't going to tell?'

There followed an illusionist January, a time so still on its surface that 1947 seemed not to have begun at all. (While, of course, in fact…) In which the Cabinet Mission-old Pethick-Lawrence, clever Cripps, military A. V. Alexander-saw their scheme for the transfer of power fail. (But of course, in fact it would only be six months until…) In which the viceroy, Wavell, understood that he was finished, washed-up, or in our own expressive word, funtoosh, (Which, of course, in fact only speeded things up, because it let in the last of the viceroys, who…) In which Mr Attlee seemed too busy deciding the future of Burma with Mr Aung Sam. (While, of course, in fact he was briefing the last viceroy, before announcing his appointment; the last-viceroy-to-be was visiting the King and being granted plenipotentiary powers; so that soon, soon…) In which the Constituent Assembly stood self-adjourned, without having settled on a Constitution. (But, of course, in fact Earl Mountbatten, the last viceroy, would be with us any day, with his inexorable ticktock, his soldier's knife that could cut subcontinents in three, and his wife who ate chicken breasts secretly behind a locked lavatory door.) And in the midst of the mirror-like stillness through which it was impossible to see the great machineries grinding, my mother, the brand-new Amina Sinai, who also looked still and unchanging although great things were happening beneath her skin, woke up one morning with a head buzzing with insomnia and a tongue thickly coated with unslept sleep and found herself saying aloud, without meaning to at all, 'What's the sun doing here, Allah? It's come up in the wrong place.'

… I must interrupt myself. I wasn't going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings; but I simply must register a protest. So, breaking into a chapter which, by a happy chance, I have named 'A Public Announcement', I issue (in the strongest possible terms) the following general medical alert: 'A certain Doctor N. Q. Baligga,' I wish to proclaim-from the rooftops! Through the loudhailers of minarets!-'is a quack. Ought to be locked up, struck off, defenestrated. Or worse: subjected to his own quackery, brought out in leprous boils by a mis-prescribed pill. Damn fool,' I underline my point, 'can't see what's under his nose!'

Having let off steam, I must leave my mother to worry for a further moment about the curious behaviour of the sun, to explain that our Padma, alarmed by my references to cracking up, has confided covertly in this Baligga-this ju-ju man! this green-medicine wallah!-and as a result, the charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to call. I, in all innocence and for Padma's sake, permitted him to examine me. I should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if you can: the fraud has pronounced me whole! 'I see no cracks,' he intoned mournfully, differing from Nelson at Copenhagen in that he possessed no good eye, his blindness not the choice of stubborn genius but the inevitable curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: 'I see no cracks.'

In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. 'Never mind, Doctor Sahib,' Padma said, 'we will look after him ourselves.' On her face I saw a kind of recognition of her own dull guilt… exit Baligga, never to return to these pages. But good God! Has the medical profession-the calling of Aadam Aziz-sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this be true, everyone will do without doctors… which brings me back to the reason why Amina Sinai awoke one morning with the sun on her lips.

'It's come up in the wrong place!' she yelped, by accident; and then, through the fading buzzing of her bad night's sleep, understood how in this month of illusion she had fallen victim to a trick, because all that had happened was that she had woken up in Delhi, in the home of her new husband, which faced east towards the sun; so the truth of the matter was that the sun was in the right place, and it was her position which had changed… but even after she grasped this elementary thought, and stored it away with the many similar mistakes she had made since coming here (because her confusion about the sun had been a regular occurrence, as if her mind were refusing to accept the alteration in her circumstances, the new, above-ground position of her bed), something of its jumbling influence remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease.

'In the end, everyone can do without fathers,' Doctor Aziz told his daughter when he said goodbye; and Reverend Mother added, 'Another orphan in the family, whatsitsname, but never mind, Muhammad was an orphan too; and you can say this for your Ahmed Sinai, whatsitsname, at least he is half Kashmiri.' Then, with his own hands, Doctor Aziz had passed a green tin trunk into the railway compartment where Ahmed Sinai awaited his bride. 'The dowry is neither small nor vast as these things go,' my grandfather said. 'We are not crorepatis, you understand. But we have given you enough; Amina will give you more.' Inside the green tin trunk: silver samovars, brocade saris, gold coins given to Doctor Aziz by grateful patients, a museum in which the exhibits represented illnesses cured and lives saved. And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so re-invented her, thus becoming in a sense her father as well as her new husband… he walked (with his own feet) along the platform as the train began to move. A relay runner at the end of his lap, he stood wreathed in smoke and comic-book vendors and the confusion of peacock-feather fans and hot snacks and the whole lethargic hullabaloo of squatting porters and plaster animals on trolleys as the train picked up speed and headed for the capital city, accelerating into the next lap of the race. In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat. With her sandals bearing down on the locked museum of her father's achievements she sped away into her new life, leaving Aadam Aziz behind to dedicate himself to an attempt to fuse the skills of Western and hakimi medicine, attempt which would gradually wear him down, convincing him that the hegemony of superstition, mumbo-jumbo and all things magical would never be broken in India, because the hakims refused to co-operate; and as he aged and the world became less real he began to doubt his own beliefs, so that by the time he saw the God in whom he had never been able to believe or disbelieve he was probably expecting to do so.

As the train pulled out of the station Ahmed Sinai jumped up and bolted the compartment door and pulled down the shutters, much to Amina's amazement; but then suddenly there were thumps outside and hands moving the doorknobs and voices saying 'Let us in, maharaj! Maharajin, are you there, ask your husband to open.' And always, in all the trains in this story, there were these voices and these fists banging and pleading; in the Frontier Mail to Bombay and in all the expresses of the years; and it was always frightening, until at last I was the one on the outside, hanging on for dear life, and begging, 'Hey, maharaj! Let me in, great sir.'

'Fare dodgers,' Ahmed Sinai said, but they were more than that. They were a prophecy. There were to be others soon.

… And now the sun was in the wrong place. She, my mother, lay in bed and felt ill-at-ease; but also excited by the thing that had happened inside her and which, for the moment, was her secret. At her side, Ahmed Sinai snored richly. No insomnia for him; none, despite the troubles which had made him bring a grey bag full of money and hide it under his bed when he thought Amina wasn't looking. My father slept soundly, wrapped in the soothing envelope of my mother's greatest gift, which turned out to be worth a good deal more than the contents of the green tin trunk: Amir, a Sinai gave Ahmed the gift of her inexhaustible assiduity.

Nobody ever took pains the way Amina did. Dark of skin, glowing of eye, my mother was by nature the most meticulous person on earth. Assiduously, she arranged flowers in the corridors and rooms of the Old Delhi house; carpets were selected with infinite care. She could spend twenty-five minutes worrying at the positioning of a chair. By the time she'd finished with her home-making, adding tiny touches bere, making fractional alterations there, Ahmed Sinai found his orphan's dwelling transformed into something gentle and loving. Amina would rise before he did, her assiduity driving her to dust everything, even the cane chick-blinds (until he agreed to employ a hamal for the purpose); but what Ahmed never knew was that his wife's talents were most dedicatedly, most determinedly applied not to the externals of their lives, but to the matter of Ahmed Sinai himself.

Why had she married him?-For solace, for children. But at first the insomnia coating her brain got in the way of her first aim; and children don't always come at once. So Amina had found herself dreaming about an undreamable poet's face and waking with an unspeakable name on her lips. You ask: what did she do about it? I answer: she gritted her teeth and set about putting herself straight. This is what she told herself: 'You big ungrateful goof, can't you see who is your husband now? Don't you know what a husband deserves?' To avoid fruitless controversy about the correct answers to these questions, let me say that, in my mother's opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. But there was a difficulty: Amina, her mind clogged up with Nadir Khan and insomnia, found she couldn't naturally provide Ahmed Sinai with these things. And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him. To do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioural, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes… in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit.

Each day she selected one fragment of Ahmed Sinai, and concentrated her entire being upon it until it became wholly familiar; until she felt fondness rising up within her and becoming affection and, finally, love. In this way she came to adore his over-loud voice and the way it assaulted her eardrums and made her tremble; and his peculiarity of always being in a good mood until after he had shaved-after which, each morning, his manner became stern, gruff, businesslike and distant; and his vulture-hooded eyes which concealed what she was sure was his inner goodness behind a bleakly ambiguous gaze; and the way his lower lip jutted out beyond his upper one; and his shortness which led him to forbid her ever to wear high heels… 'My God,' she told herself, 'it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man!' But she was undismayed. 'Who, after all,' she reasoned privately, 'ever truly knows another human being completely?' and continued to learn to love and admire his appetite for fried foods, his ability to quote Persian poetry, the furrow of anger between his eyebrows… 'At this rate,' she thought, 'there will always be something fresh about him to love; so our marriage just can't go stale.' In this way, assiduously, my mother settled down to life in the old city. The tin trunk sat unopened in an old almirah.

And Ahmed, without knowing or suspecting, found himself and his life worked upon by his wife until, little by little, he came to resemble-and to live in a place that resembled-a man he had never known and an underground chamber he had never seen. Under the influence of a painstaking magic so obscure that Amina was probably unaware of working it, Ahmed Sinai found Ms hair thinning, and what was left becoming lank and greasy; he discovered that he was willing to let it grow until it began to worm over the tops of his ears. Also, his stomach began to spread, until it became the yielding, squashy belly in which I would so often be smothered and which none of us, consciously at any rate, compared to the pudginess of Nadir Khan. His distant cousin Zobra told him, coquettishly, 'You must diet, cousinji, or we won't be able to reach you to kiss!' But it did no good… and little by little Amina constructed in Old Delhi a world of soft cushions and draperies over the windows which let in as little light as possible… she lined the chick-blinds with black cloths; and all these minute transformations helped her in her Herculean task, the task of accepting, bit by bit, that she must love a new man. (But she remained susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of… and was always drawn to men with soft stomachs and longish, lankish hair.)

You could not see the new city from the old one. In the new city, a race of pink conquerors had built palaces in pink stone; but the houses in the narrow lanes of the old city leaned over, jostled, shuffled, blocked each other's view of the roseate edifices of power. Not that anyone ever looked in that direction, anyway. In the Muslim muhallas or neighbourhoods which clustered around Chandni Chowk, people were content to look inwards into the screened-off courtyards of their lives; to roll chick-blinds down over their windows and verandahs. In the narrow lanes, young loafers held hands and linked arms and kissed when they met and stood in hip-jutting circles, facing inwards. There was no greenery and the cows kept away, knowing they weren't sacred here. Bicycle bells rang constantly. And above their cacophony sounded the cries of itinerant fruit-sellers: Come all you greats-O, eat a few dates-O!

To all of which was added, on that January morning when my mother and father were each concealing secrets from the other, the nervous clatter of the footsteps of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P. Butt; and also the insistent rattle of Lifafa Das's dugdugee drum.

When the clattering footsteps were first heard in the gullies of the muhalla, Lifafa Das and his peepshow and drum were still some distance away. Clatter-feet descended from a taxi and rushed into the narrow lanes; meanwhile, in their corner house, my mother stood in her kitchen stirring khichri for breakfast overhearing my father conversing with his distant cousin Zohra. Feet clacked past fruit salesmen and hand-holding loafers; my mother overheard:'… You newlyweds, I can't stop coming to see, cho chweet I can't tell you!' While feet approached, my father actually coloured. In those days he was in the high summer of his charm; his lower lip really didn't jut so much, the line between his eyebrows was still only faint… and Amina, stirring khichri, heard Zohra squeal, 'Oh look, pink! But then you are so fair, cousinji!…' And he was letting her listen to All-India Radio at the table, which Amina was not allowed to do; Lata Mangeshkar was singing a waily love-song as 'Just like me, don'tyouthink,' Zohra went on. 'Lovely pink babies we'll have, a perfect match, no, cousinji, pretty white couples?' And the feet clattering and the pan being stirred while 'How awful to be black, cousinji, to wake every morning and see it staring at you, in the mirror to be shown proof of your inferiority! Of course they know; even blackies know white is nicer, don'tyouthinkso?' The feet very close now and Amina stamping into the dining-room pot in hand, concentrating hard at restraining herself, thinking Why must she come today when I have news to tell and also I'll have to ask for money in front of her. Ahmed Sinai liked to be asked nicely for money, to have it wheedled out of him with caresses and sweet words until his table napkin began to rise in his lap as something moved in his pajamas; and she didn't mind, with her assiduity she learned to love this also, and when she needed money there were strokes and 'Janum, my life, please…' and'.. .Just a little so that I can make nice food and pay the bills…' and 'Such a generous man, give me what you like, I know it will be enough'… the techniques of street beggars and she'd have to do it in front of that one with her saucer eyes and giggly voice and loud chat about blackies. Feet at the door almost and Amina in the dining-room with hot khichri at the ready, so very near to Zohra's silly head, whereupon Zohra cries, 'Oh, present company excluded, of course!' just in case, not being sure whether she's been overheard or not, and 'Oh, Ahmed, cousinji, you are really too dreadful to think I meant our lovely Amina who really isn't so black but only like a white lady standing in the shade!' While Amina with her pot in hand looks at the pretty head and thinks Should I? And, Do I dare? And calms herself down with: 'It's a big day for me; and at least she raised the subject of children; so now it'll be easy for me to…' But it's too late, the wailing of Lata on the radio has drowned the sound of the doorbell so they haven't heard old Musa the bearer going to answer the door; Lata has obscured the sound of anxious feet clattering upstairs; but all of a sudden here they are, the feet of Mr Mustapha Kemal and Mr S. P. Butt, coming to a shuffling halt.